recall, even automatic. Now imagine that for more than 20 years, you’ve
practiced thinking and feeling, feeling and thinking, about suffering.
Actually, you no longer need to think about the past event to create the
feeling. You can’t seem to think or act any other way than how you always
feel. You’ve memorized suffering by your recurrent thoughts and feelings—
those related to that incident, as well as other events in your life. Your
thoughts about yourself and your life tend to be colored by feelings of
victimization and self-pity. Repeating the same thoughts and feelings
you’ve courted for more than 20 years has conditioned your body to
remember the feeling of suffering without much conscious thought. This
seems so natural and normal now. It’s who you are. And anytime you try to
change anything about yourself, it’s like the road turns back on you. You’re
right back to your old self.
What most people don’t know is that when they think about a highly
charged emotional experience, they make the brain fire in the exact
sequences and patterns as before; they are firing and wiring their brains to
the past by reinforcing those circuits into ever more hardwired networks.
They also duplicate the same chemicals in the brain and body (in varying
degrees) as if they were experiencing the event again in that moment. Those
chemicals begin to train the body to further memorize that emotion. Both
the chemical results of thinking and feeling, feeling and thinking, as well as
the neurons firing and wiring together, condition the mind and the body into
a finite set of automatic programs.
We are capable of reliving a past event over and over, perhaps thousands
of times in one lifetime. It is this unconscious repetition that trains the body
to remember that emotional state, equal to or better than the conscious mind
does. When the body remembers better than the conscious mind—that is,
when the body is the mind—that’s called a habit.
Psychologists tell us that by the time we’re in our mid-30s, our identity
or personality will be completely formed. This means that for those of us
over 35, we have memorized a select set of behaviors, attitudes, beliefs,
emotional reactions, habits, skills, associative memories, conditioned
responses, and perceptions that are now subconsciously programmed within
us. Those programs are running us, because the body has become the mind.
This means that we will think the same thoughts, feel the same feelings,
react in identical ways, behave in the same manner, believe the same
stevenselfio
(Stevenselfio)
#1